The reason for the Department's optimism is Windows 7 and a
highly-managed network using Microsoft's System Centre (that's Anglo
for "Center") Configuration Manager, Remedy suite for asset management,
Active Directory for authentication, and Aruba's Airwave for wireless
network management. Tracking software is embedded at the BIOS level and
each unit is password-protected. Embedded RFID tags will make the units
individually identifiable even if they are completely non-functional.

At the application layer they will include "...Microsoft Office, the Adobe CS4 creative suite, Apple iTunes, and content geared specifically to students." The systems have 2GB of RAM and a six hour battery and the cost to the Department is listed as $500. If this is Australian money, they it converts (on 9/27/2009) to about $434 US.

Nice systems, but could they succeed in their security goals? The mechanisms they describe could definitely succeed in making the systems easy to secure and hard to crack, even if a student were determined to do so. The use of the enterprise version of Windows 7 and System Center means that the systems are actively managed and that policies can be enforced on them that limit the ability of students to perform dangerous actions. Updates to the operating system and applications can be pushed down proactively, along with new policies as required. (Except perhaps for iTunes, which is essentially unmanageable.)

A dangerous ActiveX control or application? The administrators can control a whitelist of applications that can run on the system and nothing else is allowed to install. In fact, users are probably not allowed to install anything. Some new software and updates will be installed on the systems, but only by the administrators as they push them out over the network. A lot of malware will be blocked by web access filtering using McAfee's SmartFilter and much of what gets through that will be dealt with by the Microsoft Forefront Antivirus installed on each system.

The use of the term "unhackable" is unfortunate. Note that it appears only in the headline of the article and none of the officials involved used it. I suspect they, and Microsoft, don't like seeing it in the headline, because nothing is unhackable.

Physical access to the system, which the students will have of course, probably opens up some possibilities for attack, but most of the obvious ones can be dealt with by management and locking down: Systems can be prevented from booting off USB and CD (assuming CD drives are included), for example.

Nothing is perfect and determined students will probably find ways to break the systems, but students who just want a working and safe computer will probably be well-served by these systems, even if they are careless about them.

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